Global Warming/Climate Change Discussion Thread

  • Thread starter Thread starter ZAGGIN
  • 3,647 comments
  • 266,956 views

Which of the following statements best reflects your views on Global Warming?


  • Total voters
    497
Interesting article on climate change denial - http://www.randalolson.com/2014/09/13/who-are-the-climate-change-deniers/

There would appear to be a correlation between denial/acceptance with both political affiliation and religiosity.

Faced with belief-based opposition to the climate change message, clearly the use of facts will not sway that opposition. They already have the facts, but still believe otherwise.
 
It sounds as though you think that what the facts say cannot be disputed.

You are right. I should not have used the word "facts". That was a mistake, for which I apologize.

I should have used something like "the reasons why scientific opinion gives it a 95% probability that humans are causing most of it through activities that increase concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as deforestation and burning fossil fuels."

As for disputing that majority opinion, of course that's a fine thing to do, especially if the person disputing it has both the skills and evidence required.

I have neither, so I'm going with the 95% number.
 
You are right. I should not have used the word "facts". That was a mistake, for which I apologize.

I should have used something like "the reasons why scientific opinion gives it a 95% probability that humans are causing most of it through activities that increase concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as deforestation and burning fossil fuels."

As for disputing that majority opinion, of course that's a fine thing to do, especially if the person disputing it has both the skills and evidence required.

I have neither, so I'm going with the 95% number.

Anthropogenic climate change, especially when identifying the specific activity such as greenhouse gas emissions, is an even more narrow claim than in your previous post where you referred only to "climate change", which can be naturally occuring or anthropogenic.

In the last few decades, there has been an explosion of research and politics* in the areas of study surrounding the possibility of anthropogenic climate change. Climate science has gone through drastic changes. Every time climate scientists have attempted to map the climate forward 50 years to disaster**, their predictions have proven woefully incorrect within only a few short years. This invariably leads to some new understanding, refined models, and a new prediction which also fails in a few years.

The climate models being studied rely heavily on assigning uncertainties to particular forcing functions on global temperatures. The understanding of these phenomenon usually turns out to be very underwhelming. I attended a lecture a few years back where a worldwide expert on climate change explained that a simple factor such as the presence of clouds, was not even well enough understood to know whether more clouds causes a net cooling effect or a net warming effect. Clouds change the earth's albedo - reflecting sunlight back off into space, rejecting some of the warmth the earth receives. At the same time, they help trap warmth from the surface. It was unknown at that time whether they had a net positive or negative effect on global temperatures, so if a phenomenon caused, say, additional clouds as a byproduct (for example, if oceanic temperatures rise, this can change the formation of clouds), they didn't know whether that would have a net increase or decrease on global temperatures. Clouds... how basic is this? This lecture was given at an institute that is a leader in climate change research, an institute that I happen to work for***.

To deny mountains of scientific evidence to question something like evolution is to ignore the state of the art in that field. However, jumping to the conclusion that human beings are causing climate change, causing significant enough climate change for us to detect, causing harmful climate change, and causing climate change that will ultimately be irreversible and catastrophic, is to also ignore the state of the art in that field. This is not a field that has been around for hundreds of years. This is a relatively new area of study that has recently had massive research dollars pumped into it and has also had the unfortunate saddle of political influence from just about every nation on earth. It is going to take some time.

How will we know when the science is settled? When we start getting statistically accurate predictions that can be held up against years of data taken AFTER the prediction is made. The bright side is that progress is being made quickly. I expect us to reach this level of understanding within our lifetimes.

* of which the article you posted is an example
** At least in the highly publicized cases
*** I do not work on anything related to climate change research
 
Last edited:
Didn't know where to put this post so went for this thread as there'd been some mention of fusion-reaction;

Lockheed think they may have a working fusion reactor "in 10 years". That's the best wildly-hopeful guess I've ever seen. Source, BBC.



graphic_1374759249.jpg
 
Read about that a week or two ago, but without more concrete information, there's nothing much to say.

While the Lockheed Skunkworks has produced some incredible things over the past few decades, five years for a prototype is a long time to wait.
 
Read about that a week or two ago, but without more concrete information, there's nothing much to say.

While the Lockheed Skunkworks has produced some incredible things over the past few decades, five years for a prototype is a long time to wait.

As they say in the article; "Nuclear fusion is 30 years away... and always will be". It seems that they do have a good idea about magneto-containment, if they crack that then it'll be (another) important development. I'm a little skeptical though :)
 
As they say in the article; "Nuclear fusion is 30 years away... and always will be". It seems that they do have a good idea about magneto-containment, if they crack that then it'll be (another) important development. I'm a little skeptical though :)

That's not a grain of salt... that's Lot's wife. :D

-

Someday we may crack it... or we may never crack it... either way... we'll know more as Lockheed comes closer to completing their prototype and they start trickling out more concrete information.
 
Someday we may crack it... or we may never crack it... either way... we'll know more as Lockheed comes closer to completing their prototype and they start trickling out more concrete information.

What I'm not sure about is the purpose of Lockheed's publicity on this. Development of a truck-bearable fusion reactor would be of enormous military value alone, it doesn't quite make sense to me that they'd be so open. The only explanation I can think of is that they're trying to attract more experts in that field by presenting a viable research program, but issuing a short paper of viable findings would presumably be enough to do that in an interested community.
 
What I'm not sure about is the purpose of Lockheed's publicity on this. Development of a truck-bearable fusion reactor would be of enormous military value alone, it doesn't quite make sense to me that they'd be so open. The only explanation I can think of is that they're trying to attract more experts in that field by presenting a viable research program, but issuing a short paper of viable findings would presumably be enough to do that in an interested community.
Investors. Science isn't cheap.
 
I doubt that budget is unlimited, really... but the Skunkworks name and the allure of cheap fusion is going to be a sure draw for big money for the company.
 
I doubt that budget is unlimited, really... but the Skunkworks name and the allure of cheap fusion is going to be a sure draw for big money for the company.

Skunkworks has a reputation for some outside of the box thinking that brings really cool technology to bear, but inside lockheed it also has a bit of a reputation for dreaming too big and leaving the "details" up to other engineers to sort out. Often that's where the devil is.
 
This threads been going for about ten years, & I've only just stumbled on it. I haven't read all pages but I'm wondering if anyone else believes that the warming is not anything to worry about, but rather what may follow.........

For the record I don't believe in the warming much less that humans are behind it. But if I'm wrong about the overall warming then what it may be a pre-cursor too is a correction by nature: a mini ice age. The last time that happened half of Ireland died ( the potato famine ) & given that world food production is under the pump due to massive population increases it would seem to be a far greater problem than warming could ever be.

Today here in Australia we are experiencing an extremely hot day that will probably prove to be one of the hottest ever recorded for November. The left will all nod and finger point declaring it to be definitive proof, whilst people like me will be left thinking that a record of figures that only spans about 100 years isn't telling you much at all. But if there is a warming & it's natural, not man made, then a mini ice age may follow, does anyone else agree that this would be a bigger problem?
 
Today here in Australia we are experiencing an extremely hot day that will probably prove to be one of the hottest ever recorded for November. The left will all nod and finger point declaring it to be definitive proof, whilst people like me will be left thinking that a record of figures that only spans about 100 years isn't telling you much at all. But if there is a warming & it's natural, not man made, then a mini ice age may follow, does anyone else agree that this would be a bigger problem?

First of all, weather and global warming are completely different, weather is the temporary composition of a regional atmosphere at one time, climate is a regional condition overtime.

Second of all, our records span longer than 100 years. Records have been recorded for about 150 years by humans, but before that, we know other things have recorded conditions, there are trees in the world that are 3000 years old, and their are fossils of trees even older, we can compare the molecules in the inner rings to find out what the composition of the atmophere was like at that time, and if the inside of dead trees is not good enough of information, we have also drilled ice, we know how long it takes layers of ice to build at our north and south poles, so we have a teams there, that drill the ice and measure the amounts of gases tapped in the ice, and a funny thing happens, the atmosphere found in the inside of dead trees is the same as what we find in the layers of ice.

Some of the deeper drilling (quarter of a mile perhaps) can take samples from millions of years ago, we can also do this to rocks, but ice is easier to drill. What we have found is that for millions of years, the amounts of certain gases (most commonly known gas is CO2) decrease in the atmosphere over time; until, the 19th century. (When machines were starting to be manufactured.) And they have exponentially increased over time, and the charts of the increase and human activity is exactly the same.

You mention "mini ice ages", We know where these ice ages come from, asteroid impacts; the correlations between iceages and craters are astoundingly similar. The Gulf of Mexico in the US, is theorized to be the crater of the asteroid that killed 97% of life on Earth (The dinosaurs) 65 million years ago. There are smaller craters since then, there a crater in the Pacific Ocean that's theorized to have started the big ice age 2.5 million years ago.




Also Veritasium, a science video youtuber who has a PH.D Has some very interesting videos about climate change, as well as the institute of Hawaii, who's numbers are kind of scary; they say that many of the people alive today will begin the migration towards the poles. Hawaii says that beginning in 2020 the climate regions of the Equator will change, then in the 2030s you have Mexico And Southern India; by 2050 the majority of the current human population will be in a new region, and by 2100, the entire world will have a new climate.

Here's the awesome videos by Veritasium:

 
I honestly think that when Pinatubo blew in the early 90s, that caused a delayed increase in temperature that we're still getting the effects of today. That was the most SO2 gas put into the atmosphere since Krakatoa erupted. That is plenty of reason for a lot of variation in climate temperature that will last a long time.
 
First of all, weather and global warming are completely different, weather is the temporary composition of a regional atmosphere at one time, climate is a regional condition overtime.

Second of all, our records span longer than 100 years. Records have been recorded for about 150 years by humans, but before that, we know other things have recorded conditions, there are trees in the world that are 3000 years old, and their are fossils of trees even older, we can compare the molecules in the inner rings to find out what the composition of the atmophere was like at that time, and if the inside of dead trees is not good enough of information, we have also drilled ice, we know how long it takes layers of ice to build at our north and south poles, so we have a teams there, that drill the ice and measure the amounts of gases tapped in the ice, and a funny thing happens, the atmosphere found in the inside of dead trees is the same as what we find in the layers of ice.

Some of the deeper drilling (quarter of a mile perhaps) can take samples from millions of years ago, we can also do this to rocks, but ice is easier to drill. What we have found is that for millions of years, the amounts of certain gases (most commonly known gas is CO2) decrease in the atmosphere over time; until, the 19th century. (When machines were starting to be manufactured.) And they have exponentially increased over time, and the charts of the increase and human activity is exactly the same.

You mention "mini ice ages", We know where these ice ages come from, asteroid impacts; the correlations between iceages and craters are astoundingly similar. The Gulf of Mexico in the US, is theorized to be the crater of the asteroid that killed 97% of life on Earth (The dinosaurs) 65 million years ago. There are smaller craters since then, there a crater in the Pacific Ocean that's theorized to have started the big ice age 2.5 million years ago.




Also Veritasium, a science video youtuber who has a PH.D Has some very interesting videos about climate change, as well as the institute of Hawaii, who's numbers are kind of scary; they say that many of the people alive today will begin the migration towards the poles. Hawaii says that beginning in 2020 the climate regions of the Equator will change, then in the 2030s you have Mexico And Southern India; by 2050 the majority of the current human population will be in a new region, and by 2100, the entire world will have a new climate.

Here's the awesome videos by Veritasium:



That guy has a pretty good way of explaining things, the 2nd video was hilarious and the 1st video is the first piece of information Ive ever seen that at least attempts to explain why the 1930's ( when the level of industry and carbon emissions was way below what it is now) was one of the hottest decades on record.

Having said that Ive seen these graphs and other information like it before and it still does not convince me. This is because anyone when presented with any kind of graph must still trust the data to be 100% accurate and I dont. The talk that within the space of the century everyone will be moving to the poles seems like more hysteria designed to scare people into getting on side with the overall movement. And there seems to be no acceptance of any evidence that conflicts with climate change theory, it is branded as misinformation and scientists presenting it are discredited. This 'absolute certainty' is what really rings the alarm bells for me. It demonstrates that those presenting so called facts most likely had their minds made up that we just had to be destroying the earth well before they had the evidence it might be possible. They therefore will let nothing stand in the way of their argument.

I went hunting for more info about the last mini ice age and to clarify it did not cause the Irish famine. That was a disease of the crops. There was another wide spread European famine I confused it with, much much earlier than this in the 14th century that corresponds with the beginning of the last severe cooling period. This period was most definitely not started by an asteroid or meteor hit either. The main theories seem to revolve around solar and volcanic activity, but there is evidence that a period of severe cooling may follow a period of warming and I think the cooling would have a far greater impact on us were it to occur.
 
Last edited:
What a great documentary @Brit999. The Global Warming swindle film, reinforced just about every thing I thought about global warming. er ah climate change.

I could never get past the water vapor 'problem' to believe in global warming. On a humid night it gets hot, on a dry night it gets cold. We would have to cover the oceans with a layer of crude oil to stop the killer gas from evaporating.

Plus I knew the Commies didn't just disappear when the USSR crapped out.

Plus the closing credits have a great E.L.O., song from the Concerto for a Rainy Day.
 
Nice to see his graphs have not been manipulated /sarc

Here an awesome global warming propoganda video just like the ones you posted:



Here is an awesome video explaining the Global Warming swindle:



Why not skip the "propaganda" and go to the facts?

97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is a result of human activity. But what do they know, they've probably been infiltrated by communists who put the best part of a decade into getting a PhD. :rolleyes:
 
DK
Why not skip the "propaganda" and go to the facts?

97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is a result of human activity. But what do they know, they've probably been infiltrated by communists who put the best part of a decade into getting a PhD. :rolleyes:

PhD scientists are revising and hedging their views on climate just fast enough to prompt responsible governments to tax their citizens for the mitigation of both global warming and global cooling at the same time. The irony is delicious - if expensive.
 
DK
.....97% ...

Hahahahahahaha. What absolute Rot. That figure has been shown to be false over and over again.

clip_image0062.png


So, lets cut out the propaganda and stick with facts.

Some warming may be caused by human activities. Most is not. Taxing me to make me reduce my CO2 emissions is pointless. It is tax revenue and will have no impact on Global temperature. Ever.

Global temperature has not been affected one iota by any of the billions of dollars spent on global warming.

In the meantime millions die every year from hunger, malaria and fuel poverty. How many could have been saved if the the eco-evangelists had directed funds that way instead.
 
Legates et al. ... co-authored by Lord Monckton :ouch:

Also, your point that taxes on CO2 emissions (like what for example?) could be better spent is totally vacuous...
 
I'm no scientist and I find it very hard to try and find what is true about man made global warming. I would say I don't believe that mans CO2 emissions are the cause, as that would be the default position to hold. It seems the data from the Vostok ice core samples is also evidence that Temperature causes CO2 to go up after a few hundred years and not the other way around.

Is there any better or more relevant evidence for or against man made global warming?
 
Back